Irving Penn 1917-, American photographer, brother
of Arthur Penn, b. Plainfield, N.J.; studied
Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (1934-38). Best known
for his fashion work, he is also a master of portraiture and still
life.
Originally a painter, Penn began working working for Vogue
magazine in 1943 and became one of America's most successful fashion
photographers, known for
his cool, refined, and glamorously stylized images. In portraiture,
Penn uses plain backgrounds and
natural light and is famously adept at capturing the essence of
his sitter's personality. He has
photographed many of the world's most famous people and also traveled
worldwide to capture other
human subjects. As beautifully composed as his figural work, Penn's
still lives form a kind of collective memento mori in their concentration
on the ruined and the ephemeral : cigarette butts, fragments of
objects, fruit pits, chewed gum, and the like.
His work has been exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art and
Metropolitan Museum of Art and at the Art Institute of Chicago,
which owns his archives.
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